NOTES ABOUT NOTEBOOKS PAST I tend to accumulate last-generation tech in such a way that I do start to exist in a bit of a time warp. As I don't have any real interest in buying new tech, I'm pretty vague about the latest products and technologies. Instead I learn about them 10-15 years later via dated Wikipedia articles and abandoned websites, while trying to understand some thing I've been given or bought for $5. As part of my brief attempt at being a dodgy laptop reseller guy, before I decided that the pointless extra hardware requirements of Windows 11 would put an end to it before long anyway, I accumulated a few notebooks. The sort of junk I've been getting is all around 2010s era. Proper notebooks from that time are borderline worth my time (worth over $100 means I might make ~$50 profit for a day/afternoon of messing around cleaning, installing replacement parts, and photographing), but I've also picked up a couple of sub-spec budget notebooks which really aren't worth the effort trying to sell today. But combined with an even cheaper and lower-spec one that I picked up years ago at a hamfest for $5-10, they serve as an interesting comparison. Not a very useful one, because I only have them because nobody wants any of them anymore, but an interesting one to me. One also now has the benefit of all the info collected online by past users, which is surprisingly volumous for two of them. So here's my short summary. First off a pic of all the contenders, next to my "daily drive" laptop, a 2001 model Thinkpad R31, which is there for scale but also has roughly similar specs to the two notebooks on the left introduced around 7 years later. No built-in WiFi though, hence the beat-up PCMCIA WiFi card poking out the side. gopher://aussies.space/I/~freet/photos/notebooks/notebooks+thinkpad_big.JPG gopher://aussies.space/I/~freet/photos/notebooks/notebooks+thinkpad.JPG (big is just higher resolution (and 374KB), all other photos here are 800 pixels wide (average ~70KB) - yes I for one still care about JPG sizes) THE BIG Top left is the closest thing to a full-spec notebook from the late 2000s era. In fact it looks just like proper HP notebooks from the era and shares many design features with them. But it hides a secret, whereas others might have had a Core i7 CPU and 4GB+ RAM, this poor thing is stuck with a 1GHz processor and 1GB DDR2 RAM (2GB max). It's actually therefore about the same spec as that old Thinkpad next to it (though its VIA C7-M CPU maybe isn't so nice as the Thinkpad's Pentium III - less than a 5th of the Thermal Design Power though) which I used to have 1GB RAM in until one day the chipset started getting upset and crashing with anything over 768MB. In terms of storage space things get really nasty though. On one hand it's an IDE-connected SSD, which is nice, but on the other it only has 1GB capacity! Now this thing is from 2008 and HP is a fairly good brand so what were they doing putting out low-spec stuff like this? Well the model number is "2533t" and after finding the service manual online all is explained. This is actually just a mobile thin client PC. It came with Windows XP Embedded and was designed for running software via a server in a big orgainisation. Actually much like I'm doing for running internet software on my internet client Atomic Pi SBC and displaying on old/unupdated PCs, though I rather doubt that HP's system used the X window system. So in a big company a little money is saved (by either the company, or possibly an IT contractor) by not having to give all the employees a full-spec notebook. But unlike a lot of these thin clients that I've picked up in non-portable form, this is still a proper PC rather than some ARM, MIPS, etc. concoction pretty much locked to Windows CE, which makes it a lot more versatile. Peripheral-wise it's also quite nice. One big plus is the trackpoint on the keyboard, which I always prefer to touchpads. The keyboard itself is also quite nice for a laptop. It has audio+mic connections, SD card reader, 12" screen, VGA out, and three USB ports (probably USB2, but it doesn't say in the service manual), one in place of the optional CDROM drive. It also has a PCMCIA port, which offers extra options for expansion (eg. Compact Flash adapter for some unobtrusive extra storage without resorting to slow SD cards). 802.11a/b/g WiFi and Gbit Ethernet for the all-important (for a thin clinet) network connectivity. The RAM is also apparantly expandable to 2GB. Build quiality is good, and has clearly been put to the test based on dents to the aluminium-shelled lid. Size and weight aren't so far from a full-size laptop though compared to the cheap little things to come. 1.14Kg on my scales without battery. This is also the only one of my notebooks with a battery in it that still works, though it is an after-market one. A former owner has installed MSDOS on it, which isn't all that well suited to a PC without a floppy drive and presumably no DOS USB/PCMCIA drivers available - probably why they never put on any software. Wack on a small Linux system along with that CF card + adapter for data storage and it could serve me very well if I had a good use for another near-laptop-sized portable PC. Service manual: https://tim.id.au/laptops/hp/hp%202533t%20mobile%20thin%20client.pdf CPU info: https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/C7-M/VIA-C7-M%201000-400.html The SMALL Bottom left is an ASUS Eee PC 701SD. Looking back into the old internet articles these things seems to have caused a bit of a stir at their launch, mid 2007, for introducing a new smaller, cheaper, form factor for notebooks. At something around $500AUD at introduction though, they still weren't anywhere near the sort of cheapness which would have me buy one rather than just get some old second-hand laptop and put up with the extra size/weight. A users website was set up and collected a great array of information on the Wiki before going offline. The 7" screen is quite a ways under the 12" of that HP, and combined with the little keys and somewhat featureless case it does look a bit like a toy. The specs, however, put it still close-ish to my Thinkpad, sporting a 630MHz clocked Celeron-M CPU and 512MB DDR2 RAM (upgradable to 2GB). It has an 8GB SSD on a removable PCIe card, which is much nicer than that HP's 1GB. The small keyboard is awkward, but doesn't feel too bad. Peripherals are good, with 3x USB2 ports, audio+mic, VGA out, web-cam,, 802.11b/g WiFi, and 10/100 Mbps Ethernet. It also has an SD card reader, suitable for extra data sotorage. It feels surprisingly solid, without the flexing that you often feel with more modern thin laptops, though I wouldn't bet on it surviving the sort of abuse that my HP thin client looks to have been through. Mine has a classic "Designed for Windows XP" slapped on it (looking slightly out of proportion on such a small case), but apparantly ASUS sold these with Linux pre-installed as well, so they were a rare chance to buy a PC-architecture laptop without paying the "Microsoft tax". Now though, mine fails to find an OS after the BIOS self-check, which means that either someone wiped it, or more likely that they wore out the SSD. It looks like the BIOS is probably willing to boot from USB though. Weight without battery is just 660g, so it is a lot easier to carry about one-handed than the HP thing (to say nothing of my Thinkpad), and it's small enough that you wouldn't need a bulky bag for it either. The battery refuses to charge - the charging light just blinks. I don't think you'd get far running Firefox or Chrome on this (with the HP you might just about manage, if you tweak some settings and use NoScript), but for most other tasks I think it would still be usable with a minimal Linux installation for tasks where the screen size isn't too limiting, if you pick the right lightweight applications (which I use everywhere anyway). Eee PC 701 at the EeeUser Wiki http://web.archive.org/web/20140110084425/http://wiki.eeeuser.com/eee_pc_701 THE UGLY Now onto the one that I actually bought, at the hamfest, and that would have been well over five years ago so it newer 'to me' than the others. The bloke selling it actually had two notebooks on his table, the other being a bigger/better one and that one had already sold (while I'd passed them by looking for more interesting stuff). However only when I expressed interest in this one did the seller notice that the buyer of the other notebook had taken this thing's power supply as well. It worked out well for me in the end, because I got the price down on the basis that I'd need a PSU, and it turned out I had a suitable 9V 2A one in my junk plugpack collection at home (also works with the Eee PC which didn't come with one either!). The PSU compatibility seems to be a theme because this thing, identified only as "7" Notebook" on the dual Chinese / English sticker on the bottom, looks very much to be a cheap rip-off of ASUS' already 'cheap' Taiwanese Eee PC design. If the Eee PC looked a bit like a toy, my "7" Notebook" in its creeky cherry-red/silver plastic shell both looks and feels absolutely like one of those "my first laptop" toys that used to be around. In fact the plastic on top is actually slightly see-through. Unfortunately it's also left the realm of PC-compatibily, kicking Windows CE 6.0 along with a 300MHz ARM-WM8505 CPU and 128MB onboard RAM. Storage is reportedly 2GB NAND flash, though the OS seems to take up a lot of that if so, because it reports only 256MB (this is Windows though, so you can't believe anything it says). It does have an SD card slot, as well as audio+mic, 10/100Mbps Ethernet, and (really poor - I need to be within a few meters of my wireless router) 802.11b/g WiFi. It also has three USB ports, but two are only for keyboard/mouse HID devices, so that's a bit of a gotcha. Compared with the Eee PC it's missing VGA out and the web cam. The keyboard is really quite bad, though not nearly so annoying as the touchpad where the left mouse button actually presses on the touchpad and causes the position to move wildly when you press it, so you have to tap the pad for clicks (which I've never been very good at). The screen is decent though, as well as the sound, and in my personal case it's nice that it boots to a working OS (which only takes ~30 sec.). The battery was dead, and is actually just a naked wrapped buch of cells held under a screwed-down flap on the bottom. Weight without battery is one thing that it has over the Eee PC, only 560g. Based on the Chinese text this seems to have been produced for both the domestic Chinese market as well as overseas, and this one was probably originally bought off Ebay or a similar website rather than from a regular retailer. I have my doubts about whether Windows CE 6.0 would have been officially licenced from Microsoft too - for one thing it's copyright 2006 whereas the device seems to have been sold around 2010. It seems to have also been sold with Linux installed, and I believe the architecture is ARMv5T so it would be compatible with the armel packages for Debian. There's been an interesting amount of work done for getting Linux to run on ARM-WM8505 devices (also including various old tablets) in the past. But this all seems to have been abandoned and the mailing list for this suggests that there are major audio and flash-storage driver issues with current Linux kernel versions. There's also a video on YouTube showing someone running Android on one, but Android actually looks even worse than Windows CE to me. I never actually tracked down the instructions for installing another OS on it, but one site shows where the serial port can be accessed on the circuit board, so you can probably use TFTP or something, controlled from the serial terminal. I decided to stick with Windows CE, for lack of a clearly successful path to Linux. The only actual use that I found for the thing has been a video player that is small enough to sit on my workbench while I assemble electronics. The video is a bit choppy but watchable for the sort of documentary stuff I watch, however it tends to pause, probably because it can't keep up reading the video file, and then the audio sync gets lost. A media player called Core Player seems to be the best, but it's still not quite good enough. I looked around for SSH clients in the past but never found much free software for Windows CE 6 and ARM (with different versions and architectures, finding suitable WinCE software is a real pain). Recently though I noticed in my downloads folder a copy of Pocket PuTTY, confusing labeled as for "WM2003" (Windows Mobile 2003), downloaded sometime earlier when I was getting distracted. I copied it over via the 1GB SD card that I've taken to keeping in it and what do you know, it works. It won't connect to SSH servers requiring the latest key exchange algorithums, but it does connect to more lenient ones as well as offering Telnet access to my Internet Client computer. From icli I can use text-based web browsers and all that fun (because of course the copy of IE in winCE 6 is dead to modern HTTPS), as well as SSH/Mosh into aussies.space and the like. Thinking about how to access downloaded files, I also discovered an FTP client for winCE (no WinCE didn't include Telnet or FTP clients by default, at least not in this installation). It uses a pretty weird command syntax, but it seems to work. So it's altogether useful, but I still don't really have a use for it. Maybe I'll look into replacing the battery sometime though. WM8505 Linux mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/vt8500-wm8505-linux-kernel Modified Linux kernel: https://github.com/projectgus/kernel_wm8505 Debian armel platform info: https://wiki.debian.org/ArmEabiPort Hacking the WM8505 Mini Laptop: https://wm8505.blogspot.com/2010/07/hacking-wm8505-mini-laptop.html PocketPuTTY: http://web.archive.org/web/20081230162239/http://www.pocketputty.net/ Open-Source FTP Client with compatible Win CE 6 version: https://sourceforge.net/projects/ultralightftpc/ Photos of this and the Eee PC: keyboard layouts gopher://aussies.space/I/~freet/photos/notebooks/7in/keyboards.JPG without the battery, the 7" Notebook falls over when the screen is bent back gopher://aussies.space/I/~freet/photos/notebooks/7in/tippy-top.JPG Photos of WinCE on the 7" Notebook: Desktop gopher://aussies.space/I/~freet/photos/notebooks/7in/desktop.JPG FTP tests gopher://aussies.space/I/~freet/photos/notebooks/7in/FTP.JPG gopher://aussies.space/I/~freet/photos/notebooks/7in/FTP_downloaded.JPG Pocket PuTTY connecting to aussies.space via Telnet to icli gopher://aussies.space/I/~freet/photos/notebooks/7in/Pocket_PuTTY.JPG gopher://aussies.space/I/~freet/photos/notebooks/7in/Lynx.JPG Video playback in Core Player ("Introduction to Holography" is a really interesting educational film, by the way) gopher://aussies.space/I/~freet/photos/notebooks/7in/video_playback.JPG Well, I hope someone got something from all that. I think I'm done with notebooks for (what's left of) today! - The Free Thinker